Disappointment as a Brain Boost

Work in innovation and you’re bound to be saddened by situations, often beyond your control. Letdowns tend to come faster when you’re tired, or when you leap too high, too soon. Lack of awareness usually leads the way!

If you measure the size of your success by the strength of your talents, you likely regret washouts as irreversible blows to your brain. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Disappointment as a Brain Boost

That sudden collapse of hope may leaves scars of defeat, but it needn’t leave you in despair. Few deny that it’s rarely easy to step past mischance at first. Those who find a way beyond their initial impasse, though, tend to boost brainpower for new wins. How so?

1. Chase one new adventure today, and disappoints will dim as your working memory engages novel challenges.

2. Risk doing a new hobby for profit or fun, and your brain rewires new neuron pathways into opportunities that many crave.

3. Inspire a new venture with an upbeat peer, and prevent your brain from defaulting back to ruts that cause bummer limitations to a fresh focus.

4. Play with hidden or unused intelligences to remove the taste of disappointment’s bitter pill.

5. Laugh at the little things, and misfortune become a flash in the pan. Humor’s chemical hormones release conditions for new innovations, that few grumps optimize.

Disappointments are to the brain what bitter storms are to a summer day. In both cases relief comes more from living euphoria on the other side of rainclouds – than in settling in for washouts. It’s about rewiring brainpower for another shot at progress.

Holidays can be the worst time for depression and loneliness to spawn! But it doesn’t have to be this way, if you create space for mindfulness, stress shrinks by default!

Have you noticed that to deal with mischance as an insight forward, is to change the chemical and electrical networks in your brain? Transform disaster and defeat into rejuvenated directions that emulate care and curiosity for the next opportunity that could be yours. The opposite is also true.

6 thoughts on “Disappointment as a Brain Boost”

Kate thanks for stopping by, and for insightful thoughts, on a key topic.

Great questions: “Is this really “will” over chemicals? Can determination to see it differently change the chemistry? Or do the letdown feelings continue for a bit while your positive behavior surge forward?”

No, it’s really more than will over chemicals, and is a learned behavior. You rewire for disappointment by living serotonin responses in daily events, so that your brain is somewhat prepared for them in the tougher events – where cortisol chemicals can prevent good decision making. Those who prepare ahead fare better – since they had wired brainpower to work more in their favor ahead.

Brainpowered living (and using smart skills to succeed) is learned but becomes a powerful tool to carry folks through disappointments we all face, but only some survive.

Great idea Robyn, and it also reminds me of the fact that we benefit greatly by mutual mentoring. Thanks! People in another field, and with different goals and opposite agendas, tend to have a great deal to offer.

By sharing this, you show how easy it is to fall prey to disappointment, yet you also provide tips to work against letting it drown you. I’d like to add this one: “Meet with a successful mentor to grab hold of ideas s/he suggest to move forward.” Added to this, someone from a very different field can offer ideas you might not have considered since s/he views situations with other lenses.